Posted on 08/25/2002 7:17:15 PM PDT by Jean S
Kelly, Wyo. - Here in a spectacular corner of the American West, Herb Kohl quietly keeps a pricey horse ranch.
The Red Hills Ranch, which he built 26 years ago, is more than a mountain retreat.
Its 160 acres are a dude ranch for his friends, a business venture for his portfolio and a haven from the high-pressure worlds he straddles: politics and pro sports.
Sixty-seven years old, Kohl owns the Milwaukee Bucks, making him the only U.S. senator who has a professional sports team. At the ranch, he breeds horses, mostly Paints, which are splashily colored quarter horses.
In the mid-1970s, when Kohl picked up the ranch - RHR, for short - it sprouted only sagebrush and a ramshackle cabin.
The lure?
Panoramic views, both of the saw-toothed Rockies and the slumbering clay giants called the Red Hills. Isolation was a draw, since national lands - mostly forests - keep development at bay. Finally, there was the potency of the West.
Today, Red Hills is a showplace, with a custom-built log lodge, three guest cabins straddling a river and, on a hill, Kohl's private quarters. He says he gets out here a few times a year.
He calls it his place to unwind, even though a half-dozen or so daily newspapers arrive by FedEx for him in Jackson, 28 miles away.
Cell phones, pagers? "Nothing like that out here," Kohl smiles. "When I'm out here, I feel totally relaxed and comfortable. After five or six days, I'm more vigorous and full of energy. I have a new perspective."
For years, he's kept the place largely under wraps, except to the 75 or so friends and relatives who come to play cowboy and ride horses, fish, spot wildlife and hike during the three summer months it hosts guests.
Some are well-known: the late Al McGuire, Bucks coach George Karl and former Marquette University basketball coach Rick Majerus, now at the University of Utah.
Two senators - Iowa's Tom Harkin and Maryland's Barbara Mikulski, both, like Kohl, Democrats - also have dropped in, a Kohl associate says.
He also welcomes personal friends and political cronies, plus their children and grandchildren. A favorite waitress from Milwaukee and her husband even snagged an invite. Kohl says he likes hosting "regular people"; for one thing, they enjoy it more than the high and mighty.
Saturday, he showed his place in the hours leading up to the public auction of the horses produced by the ranch breeding operation. The auction, drawing 51 buyers, saw 44 horses - "beautiful creatures," in his words - snapped up in less than 21/2 hours.
They went for $650 to $4,200 in what the senator called "not big, high-stakes stuff, but a family-type auction" with trucks and trailers streaming in from Wyoming, Utah, Montana and Idaho.
The sales are every two years or so.
According to Senate disclosures, Kohl has reported $308,681 in income from horse sales since 1990; cattle sales, in 1990 alone, netted him $111,341.
Kohl says he first visited Jackson 30 years ago, coming back again and again. He decided to spring for the land after, associates say, scrupulous consideration involving lawyers and advisers.
The heir to a grocery and department store fortune, he was pushing 40 when he bought. Gene Hoffman, now 71, a rancher and real estate consultant, handled the transaction.
He remembers that Kohl had three criteria as he scoured the canyons and buttes for the perfect spot: beauty, remoteness and investment potential. "It had to make economic sense," Hoffman remembers.
The seller was a U.S. senator from Wyoming, Republican Clifford P. Hansen, who is now retired and earlier was the state's governor. Hansen, 89, says he doesn't remember the sale price but with today's eye-popping real state prices here "it would bring a fair chunk of dough."
Meanwhile, he salutes Kohl as a "good steward of the land."
Kohl, in his Senate financial disclosure, put the value of Red Hills Ranch in the $5 million to $25 million range. B.K. Reno, an associate broker at Jackson Hole Realty, said last week that a comparable ranch featuring 151 acres is on the market; he predicted it would fetch $25 million to $30 million.
The inaccessibility of Kohl's place, reached via steep, unpaved roads and open only to snowmobiles during the winter, affects its value, Reno says. Still, the 50-year-old broker admits he's "been in love with that place since I was a little kid" in light of the aesthetics.
The property is zoned rural; its land and buildings are assessed as agricultural land. Not far away, Kohl has another 1,227 acres - in the words of Hansen, the former senator, "he's put together quite a big block." The local assessor puts the market value of that land at about $331,000, but again that's based on agricultural use.
Those parcels are even more remote, and a cattle-rearing operation that Kohl had for a time there couldn't be sustained, says Roger Lasson, 63. Lasson and his wife, Paula, have managed the Kohl ranches for 26 years.
Lasson calls Red Hills Ranch "a quiet place. (Kohl) appreciates the beauty, and he just likes these horses."
It is quiet but for the low neighing of horses and the soft thud of a mares and weanlings galloping across emerald, irrigated pastures.
The main lodge looks out to dozens and dozens of paints, and beyond, the red clay hills, and further, the jagged Grand Teton Range.
The lodge has cathedral ceilings, exposed beams and two huge stone fireplaces. Inside, there are Western furnishings and rodeo art, but the real draw is the great outdoors, hence, large windows and a viewing scope.
Only people ambitious enough to lift their backsides off oversize leather chairs take a gander.
In these parts, signs along the roads warn of grizzly bears and bison; the hills are known to host elk, coyote, big-horned sheep, wolves and mountain lions. Kohl says by Christmas, the place is snowed in. Former owner Hansen remembers that in winter months, the mountain-dwelling sheep are right along the road "so close you could almost reach out and touch them."
The Gros Ventre River, which cuts through the land, beckons anglers. The hills, awash in pine and aspen and dotted with wildflowers, look even prettier on horseback, to hear guests tell it.
Most people know the Milwaukee-born Kohl's public face, since his many high-profile endeavors - U.S. senator, Milwaukee Bucks owner and philanthropist - make him one of Wisconsin's best-known people.
But only the chosen see the gentleman cowboy, who chose a purple Bucks cap - not cowboy headgear - for Saturday's auction.
His put-up-yer-feet lodge hosts writings by the Dalai Lama just as it does the cowboy's guide to life by Texas Bix Bender. Kohl, as friends tell it, usually prefers thinking, reading and roaming to more rugged pursuits, although he does ride.
"I get a lot of renewal out there, spiritual and physical," Kohl says. "It's a beautiful place, and I built it, so I have the feeling of creating something very special."
Jon Leibowitz, a Kohl guest Saturday, is a former Senate staffer who now works in Washington for the Motion Picture Association of America. Leibowitz, 44, came with his wife and two daughters, 7 and 5, enjoying a week at Red Hills Ranch.
Kohl played matchmaker to bring Leibowitz and his wife, Ruth Marcus, a Washington Post reporter, together. They're not shy about acknowledging that their older daughter was conceived at Red Hills; the senator himself has told the story to crowds.
"A slice of heaven," Leibowitz judges the place, reminding that Kohl does get work done there - for instance, studying thick briefing books before the Senate confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justices David Souter and Clarence Thomas.
Jackson, long a magnet for the monied, is home to Grand Teton National Park. Supply and demand explains the area's staggering real estate costs; about 97% of Teton County land is in government hands, such as the National Park Service and Forest Service, leaving little for private development, says Paul Taylor, a Teton County staff planner.
In these parts, Vice President Dick Cheney puts up his feet - just last week, in fact - along with high-rollers such as World Bank President James Wolfenson. Movie stars such as Harrison Ford and Sandra Bullock keep homes here, too, in the rugged terrain that moviemakers long have used as a backdrop for Westerns.
Meantime, ordinary tourists flock to Jackson to raft, fly-fish and visit dude ranches in the summer and to ski in the winter.
Hoffman, the real estate broker who handled the Kohl purchase, says the ranch has become a place "where Kohl soul-searches. He pretty much stays to himself there, and that's very important to him, because he's such a public figure in Milwaukee or Washington or wherever. That time, being away from hordes of people, is very important to him."
Hansen, the retired senator, says that he saw Kohl about two weeks ago but that encounters are rare. "He's a very busy man," he says, "and just from my own recollection, there are precious moments that he gets to spend out here."
Can you picture Barbara Mikulski on a horse?
And this did not escape notice...
"Kohl played matchmaker to bring Leibowitz {former Chief of Staff} and his wife, Ruth Marcus, a Washington Post reporter...."
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